In 1945 a Jewish demographer, Joseph Gentilli, predicted that by the twenty-first century, almost no Jews would be living in Australia. This prediction has proved to be totally false because of the influx of immigrants, particularly of the survivors after World War II. In the immediate post-war years, Australian Jewry experienced a transformation in every aspect of community life.

Diversification of religious life

The religious structure of Australian Jewry is very different from that in the United States. Until 1933, Australian Jewry was very assimilated and conservative, tending to be ‘more British than the British’. This was reflected in the early ‘cathedral synagogues’ established in Sydney and Melbourne, which maintained a ‘high church atmosphere’. Most Australian Jews considered themselves Australians of the Jewish faith, and distinctive religious practices, such as the observance of dietary laws or the wearing of a skullcap, were poorly maintained. The derivative nature of Australian culture, reflected in the Jewish community, resulted in a limited and conservative response by Australian Jews to the nineteenth-century challenges of modernisation. In the period when religious change predominated in North America, with the development of Reform and Conservative Judaism, the various Jewish communities in Australia developed a uniform reaction – the Anglo-Jewish form of modern orthodoxy – which remained rigid and standardised.

All this changed with the pre- and post-World War II Jewish immigration, which radically altered the face of Australian Jewry and diversified Jewish life (see Appendix I)